The day started out very crazy, and I must admit, didn’t get much better as it progressed. We knew before it started that it was going to be chock full of “activities”.

Marek, Lina and I had a presentation scheduled at 8 AM, sparsely attended but well received, and recorded for Conference “On-Demand” subscribers. We’d never done a panel like this and preparing it was a little stressful because of that, but Lina (as always) was incredibly organized and put a wonderful powerpoint together for us.

There was a short break after the early session and we used that to finish packing, move our suitcases around for safe storage for the next few hours, for Ola (who had just joined us) and Marek to head off to the archives for last minute record pulls and Lina and Lindsay to go back to the Ancestry booth, and me, well I used the time to answer questions from a lot of people, primarily about Ukraine SIG. The next two sessions – the Ukraine SIG general meeting and our lunch went very well, and then….

Marek and I met to take a cab to the airport where we were to pick up a 7 person van. We were prepared. We had made arrangements through travel professionals, had gotten international driver’s licenses, I was using a credit card with no transaction fees and which included all sorts of rental coverage internationally. There was one snag. It was a big one.

Our takeaway is that when renting vehicles internationally, no matter who (unless of course it’s yourself) makes that reservation for you, follow up, call the car company yourself and make sure you can take it into ALL the countries you plan to visit. In this case, it turned out that NONE of the major car rental companies would permit a car to be driven into Ukraine…